Tennis developed within an upper-class culture in the UK that used the game to cultivate and display emotional control. One of the goals was to be able to watch your opponent completely outwit and outplay you, even to the possible level of humiliation, and to accept it with aplomb and even good cheer (“Jolly good play my boy! Jolly good! Wizard!”).
It required, in part, a perspective shift and an awareness of how one responds to a potential affront. The point win was due to your opponent’s cleverness and excellence, which should be applauded, and not your failure (you did your best). Even if your opponent gloated, that did not mean you needed to lower yourself and respond with anger.
Sports are supposed to build character according to generations of coaches, PE teachers and parents. They teach one to compete hard, never give up, show endurance and resilience, be a graceful winner, accept negative results without resentment, shake hands, learn humility. Yet, if you watch modern professional sports, you see something very different.
You see grown adults melting down over conscientious judgment calls, screaming obscenities at officials, smashing equipment and sometimes escalating things into outright violence. It happens largely because we are in a culture where anger is not just tolerated but monetized. Our children watch all of it, not absorbing the possible lesson that frustration does not have to lead to anger but that frustration justifies anger and aggression, and we have the right to verbally or physically attack those who seem to be the cause of our frustration.
Roland Garros is the perfect case study. It’s one of the last major tournaments that still uses old‑school officiating: no electronic line calling, no laser beams. When a ball is close, the umpire climbs down, inspects the clay, and tries to identify the correct mark among a dozen overlapping ones. Half the time, even with good faith, it’s ambiguous. The umpire makes the best call they can. Then the circus begins.
A player becomes convinced the umpire looked at the wrong mark. They throw their racket, scream, gesture wildly. Another player, certain their shot was in, crosses the net against the rules to inspect the mark themselves. Their opponent, a calm, decent person, points to two marks, both out, but admits uncertainty as to which one is the last. The first player calls the second a liar. The umpire arrives, confirms the ball was out, and now the umpire is a liar too.
The player spirals into aggressive outrage. Later, the accused opponent holds a tearful press conference. They don’t look like a liar and they don’t like being called one. They look like someone victimized by another athlete’s inability to regulate their own frustration. This has become a pattern. One suspects the tennis bigshots in the world got together and decided these shenanigans were good for profits, if not for our society’s children. And it’s not limited to tennis.
There’s a highly popular YouTube channel where a guy lip‑reads baseball arguments between players, coaches and umpires and he also analyzes baseball fights. What you see there is astonishing: grown men, many college-educated, managers, coaches, players, unleashing streams of obscenities at umpires over borderline calls. We do not see controlled disagreement.
We see full‑throttle, dehumanizing tirades. The umpires barely react because they’ve been screamed at so often that they can let it go. They eject the offender and move on to further abuse for trying to do their jobs as well as they can. I am guessing the baseball bigshots like this too.
Recently, a Chicago White Sox fan got close enough to a Cubs player to tell him that he “sucked.” They are cross-town rivals, South Side versus North Side, and she felt she had the right to scream negative, insulting stuff at a man because he was a “Cub” – a guy whom she doesn’t even know. So fans believe they can come to sporting events to abuse human beings as well.
But, honestly, “You suck!” is nothing. It’s the same as saying “I don’t like your team.” It’s the lowest-grade heckle in baseball. Yet, the Cubs player responded with a sexual statement calculated to offend, shock, and demean the woman. Afterward, he said he shouldn’t have dropped to her level, but he dropped far below anything she did.
He took something relatively benign and turned it into verbal sexual aggression. The response wasn’t proportional. Why did this happen? Maybe the answer is that professional sports do not necessarily build character, but instead build ego, entitlement, emotional volatility and raw aggression. So let’s take a closer look at what could be done in sports but what they are doing instead.
Frustration Leads to Anger: The Missing Link Nobody Teaches
Frustration is the primary source of anger. When an athlete believes something unfair has happened (a bad call, a missed mark, a borderline strike) frustration kicks in. The amygdala lights up, stress hormones spike, the body prepares for confrontation, the body prepares to achieve its thwarted goal by force.
Frustration is, however, merely a gap between expectation and reality. In a healthy emotional system, frustration is recognized, named and diffused; it does not have to lead to anger. You breathe, you reset. If you are a mature adult who has worked on themselves, you accept that not everything will go your way in life and verbally abusing another human being is just not acceptable. You maintain perspective instead of indulging in the bitter feelings of a bruised ego.
In sports, that “mindfulness” is rarely, if ever, taught. Instead, athletes learn that frustration is fuel. They’re told to “play angry,” “use it,” “channel it,” “show that fire in your belly.” They’re conditioned to believe that emotional intensity equals competitive edge. So when frustration hits, they don’t diffuse it, they escalate it and allow it to develop into anger, which is only one step away from violence. On the YouTube channel, as you watch the managers call the umpires every foul name in the book, you become almost certain that punches will soon fly. Only the composure of the umpires stops that. Also, the sanctions against hitting an umpire are quite extreme.
Anger narrows the mind, reduces empathy and amplifies threat perception. It primes the body for attack so the athlete/coach stops seeing the umpire or opponent as a human being and starts seeing them as an obstacle, an enemy or a target. Anger often dehumanizes and gives license toward harming another. They now feel they have the moral right to do something wrong. This is how a pitcher decides to throw a 95‑mph fastball at a human being’s head. The problem is the absence of emotional training.
The “He Deserves It” Impulse
The second issue is deeper and it’s the moral permission impulse athletes rely on when they go after another person. We can call it the “he deserves it” reflex or impulse.
Humans have a built‑in mechanism, which most people don’t even recognize let alone judge, that justifies aggression when we believe we’ve been wronged. It’s tied to the brain’s reward circuitry. When someone feels slighted, insulted, cheated or shown disrespect, the brain generates a surge of righteous indignation. That indignation feels like a clear moral imperative, but it’s actually a cognitive distortion: one believes that harming someone is justified because they “deserve” it.
This reflex is powerful because it’s self‑reinforcing. Anger produces adrenaline, adrenaline produces a sense of power, that sense of power feels like righteousness and righteousness feels like truth. So people do not even recognize that their behavior is being bizarrely manipulated through brain chemicals and they are being pushed into doing something wrong.
They do not realize they have a choice in this matter. They can say “no.” Regardless of all the neuroscientists writing books telling us we don’t have free will, we DO because each one of us can say, “Wait, I see this…it’s wrong…NO!”
So the athlete thinks: “The umpire was unfair to me, they deserve to be yelled at.” “My opponent questioned me, they deserve to be called a liar.” “That batter showed me up, he deserves a ball thrown at him.” “That woman said I suck, she deserves to be verbally sexually assaulted.” This often unrecognized impulse gets dirty, fast. We view it as entertainment, but it is wrong because we falsely think we now have the moral right to harm others. It’s a complete biochemical distortion of what’s ethical.
It is actually the impulse behind lots of dehumanization campaigns on a larger scale. “He’s in the country illegally. He deserves to be separated from his family and sent to some jungle prison.” “Those children are not from my ethnicity, race or religion, so it’s OK for them to be bombed.” Through this impulse, we often feel morally heroic for harming innocent people.
Sports fights are deceptive emotional reflexes suddenly masquerading as moral action. Because the athlete feels justified, they don’t see the harm they’re causing. They don’t see the umpire as a person doing their best. They don’t see the opponent as someone who might be confused, not deceitful. They don’t see the batter as a human being with a nose that can be broken. They only see the story their brain is telling them: “They deserve it. It is right for me to hurt them!”
The Cultural Incentive: Anger Sells
If sports truly wanted to teach character, they would train athletes to interrupt this reflex. They would teach emotional regulation, perspective‑taking and conflict de‑escalation. They would treat anger as a skill to be managed, not a spectacle to be monetized.
But modern sports are entertainment products and anger is entertaining. A smashed racket gets more clicks than a handshake, a dugout brawl gets more views than a clean double play and a screaming match between a manager and an umpire often goes viral.
Crowds respond to conflict with a hormonal spike. They cheer, they gasp, they suddenly feel alive and the industry knows this. So instead of discouraging anger, sports culture encourages it. When two hockey players want to fight, the referees clear out a little area for them to do so and the crowd goes nuts. Sports fights are becoming big in the attention economy. We monetize emotional immaturity and the inability to see what’s really pushing us to do what we do.
Sports can build character only if emotional regulation is part of the curriculum, only if athletes are taught that frustration is normal, anger is manageable, and aggression is a choice, better observed in the breach, not a necessity.
What Needs to Change
Many aspects of capitalism push us toward immoral behavior and that’s what’s happening in sports. If sports want to reclaim a moral purpose, if they want to be something more than lucrative anger theater, they need to address two core issues:
First, teach frustration management. Athletes should learn how to recognize the moment frustration arises and how to pause and diffuse it before reacting.
Second, expose the “he deserves it” reflex. Athletes need to understand that moral justification toward violence is often a chemical illusion. Anger can feel righteous but is rarely humane. Aggression is not strength and harming someone because you feel wronged is not justice.
Right now, our culture rewards anger, volatility and the illusion of righteousness. It rewards the spectacle of adults losing control. It rewards the “he deserves it” reflex and this reflex becomes a toxic social norm.
If we want sports to teach something better, something worthy of the priceless millions of children who watch it, then anger management and moral awareness must become a central part of athletic training: a requirement. Frustration is inevitable but anger is optional. Violence is a choice to be rejected. Character is not built by what you feel but by what you do when you feel something and can understand, judge and reject it.
iStock image
